Photoscan using Metashape | VFX fundamentals

Photoscan have in recent years become an important ingredient in the VFX toolbox. It can be an inexpensive way to capture a model for retopology or a way to capture a set for easier match move. Nowadays scanning companies such as clear angle also use photogrammetry techniques but in a customized way where they connect a large array of cameras into something we in Visual effects call a photo booth. One-click and all cameras go off at the same time and once processed you get a very detailed version of the subject. Most Digi doubles in movies are captured in this was today. But today’s VFX fundamentals is a bit more modest I only use one camera on a static object. In the studio, I have a Micheline man statue that to my dog’s delight I brought to my garden patio and blasted about 150 images from around the statue. All of this to demonstrate the basic principles of photoscan using agisoft meta shape.

Capturing for photoscan

There are a few principles when capturing photos for photoscan. First off you don’t want to capture a reflective object as reflections will fool the scan process. It’s usually good to capture in overcast or diffuse light but I have had good success in daylight scenarios as well. When capturing an object you want to be strategic and shoot around the object in a circle and from different heights and vantage points trying to cover all angles from high to low. In my case, as it was a small object in hindsight it could have been beneficial to raise the object up from the ground but the shoot worked out pretty ok.

Let’s take a look at all of this in action

Conclusion

It’s pretty easy to get a decent object from a number of photos and I bet your photo would even produce a decent result so you don’t have to use the best camera and lenses. In this example, I used a commercial program but I will in a later episode come back and use free software as well, Stay tuned for this episode!

HDR Capture for VFX

Capturing HDR images is the bread and butter on any film production set that involves visual effects. It’s the fastest way to get the lighting captured from the set on the day of the shoot. In visual effects, we use it for look development purpose as well as in shot production with additional localized lighting. The drawback with HDR lights is falloff or mainly the lack of falloff. If you take the sun it’s very far away in real life, 149.6 million km to be exact. We are essentially remapping the surrounding light contribution to a sphere so the sun and your kitchen light will be equally far away in computer graphics terms. In most cases, this will not make much of a difference and it is used for cheap reflections.

The process

I have been capturing HDR for my personal library for a long time and this is a list of some of the tools and techniques I use.

Conclusion

Capturing HDR images will still have its place in VFX for the foreseeable future. We can also get some kind of dimension back by taking our captured HDR and remap it to a scan or a model of a room or environment. I will cover this technique in an upcoming VFX fundamentals episode.

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Mari Material System

The new Mari Material System in Mari 4.5 was just released and with it comes faster workflows in automation when it comes to texturing in bulk as well as hero assets for Visual Effects. In this new Mari Material series, I will start off by looking at the new Arnold shader and build materials around it. I will use Maya and Mari in conjunction while using a real Cinema style lens from the studio as material inspiration.

About the Mari Material System

The Material system in Mari is based around vendor shaders and first out is support from Unreal and Arnold. Each material is built for a specific shader where you can define texture input from all input connections found in the shader. This workflow is a bit different to Substance where you have a more shader agnostic workflow. However, the cost means you can’t map all available settings in a specific shader but rather the most common inputs. It’s just another take on a material system. I hope to see a Renderman shader down the line as this is the Renderer I use at work and also here in my studio.

“Mari material system will help to bring automation into Mari”

Peter Aversten

About the project

The first installment of this new material series will be based around using the Arnold shader and one of my lenses as inspiration. I recently acquired a Cinema Style lens from Xeen for my own project and it has a few interesting materials from aluminum to some kind of anodized metal and the housing is painted metal. So the textures will be both index of refraction as well as metalness driven in the materials I create.

Now let’s take a look at the workflows

Conclusion

The new Material system is flexible enough to be able to map almost all aspects of the shader. You will not be able to preview all aspects of the Arnold shader but I guess that is expected as its an OpenGL representation. The Material system is a good first start but I think some basic connections between different DCC applications such as Maya and Katana would be great. The ingest tool that was developed for texture resources could be expanded to support already Look developed values from Maya or Katana where you could send the shader settings into a Mari material as a starting point. Another thing when building materials from scratch could be some kind of mechanism to auto-populate the inputs on materials with nodes so I don’t have to create all sliders or color inputs to match the setup I had in Maya. A template system would be good here.

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Mari 4.5 First Impressions

The Mari 4.5 release is imminent and with this comes the new material system that will make bulk texturing and automation much easier. The material system is building on gizmo type workflows in the node graph where you define a material within a group exposing multiple outputs. Each material container looks at the underlying shader when it creates available slots .

There are new vendor shaders, first out is an official shaders from Autodesk Arnold and the Unreal shader.

I’m hoping to see more vendor shaders where Renderman is on the top of my wish list.

There is also a new ingest tool to help in the process of ingesting surface scans from material scans libraries.

“Mari material system will help to bring automation into Mari”

Peter Aversten

Main material workflow

The Material system in this initial release is mostly geared towards the channel and layers system. Foundry hinted in a roadmap video that it will later expand towards the node graph in subsequent releases. There are new ways to blend full materials using the layer stack with the ability to group materials together for additional complexity if needed.

The blending of materials is now handled by Mari directly and it will be less effort for the basic setup. Instead of building the underlying infrastructure for my network I can concentrate on creating greatly detailed masks using a combination of smart mask gizmos and hand painted details. I can see a big benefit using material workflows in larger studios where a lot of artists collaborate and share materials.

New shaders

The new Mari 4.5 ships with two new vendor certified shaders, Arnold and Unreal. Arnold uses both metallic and index of refraction workflows in its shader and seems to have all the input slots the Maya Arnold shader have. I briefly examined it and some of the shader inputs are stub inputs and do not do anything visually. All aspects of the shader can’t be previewed in OpenGL. The inputs are there for you to still be able to define values if needed. I envision a workflow where one would take values from the lookdev department and translate it into their Mari material.

Once you have this material defined it can be exported and then offline render the material swatch using the real renderer. You would get a true preview of what the material would look like if used in the offline renderer. For this to happen I would need a way to swap the material preview icon for materials and I actually requested this during the beta stage. Hopefully, I get this functionality down the line.

Mari Material ingest tool

Under the tool menu, there is a new material ingest tool that will help in the process to batch create materials from resources such as Quixel Megascans.

First, you select what shader model you want to create materials for and if its a tiled or a triplanar projections material. You point the tool to a location and tell it where the scans is living on disk. You can choose to either just create the materials or also add them to a material shelf.

About Material Creation

The materials are created as I already mentioned using the node-graph from scratch or the ingest tool. I will use the ingest tool to load textures into my project and build on top of this to create more complex materials similar to when I created my own material system using the node-graph from scratch.I hope an improved ingest tool using predefined templates is adopted down the road.

If I could use templates I would add override nodes or even switches to have both tiled and triplanar materials using conditional nodes. Sure I can do this currently but it is at the time and expense of extra effort going into each material reconfiguring the graph and saving the materials again.

Materials in the shelf

The materials you create needs to be housed somewhere and in this initial release, they reside in the shelf next to the brushes with further development of this material system. I think they need to find its own tab with more flexibility to filter and visualize the materials. The icons are pretty small when stored on the regular shelf as it was mainly built to store brushes and color swatches. I would like to see auto expandable icons that enlarge when you hover over them as well as a way to swap icons using so we could offline render our icons using our own render engines if needed.

Conclusion

So what are my thoughts of this initial Mari material release from Foundry?

At first, I had mixed feelings around each material needing its own shader, mainly because in the first release I won’t have a Renderman shader. My first reaction was that it would be shader agnostic but when I started to think about it further it can be a good thing to be able to still define all inputs needed for your material, not just the basic colour, spec roughness metallic etc. If you compare this system with the Substance Painter it’s quite different and in a way more geared towards VFX and where Mari has its roots.

I was expecting better support in the node-graph. The nodes are beyond huge and multi bake-point cache nodes shines with its lack of existence, but I guess the material system is a massive rewrite to support this new workflow and needs to be delivered in phases.

I’m looking forward to the time when the next Alpha and Beta cycle takes off. It will hopefully be geared towards node-graph workflows.

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Create a HDR from a scene using Renderman

Sometimes you want to take away the complexity of having a complete scene and instead render using a HDR light to mimic the light and reflections from the original scene. Sure the effect will not be physically correct as you will not have the same spacial information but sometimes that is not needed.

Create a HDR from a scene using Renderman Sometimes you want to take away the complexity of having a complete scene and instead render using a HDR light to mimic the light and reflections from the original scene. Sure the effect will not be physically correct as...

Peter Aversten Lead Texture ArtistsBloggerMeshmen Studios Layered Displacement in Renderman 22Megascan materials and Zbrush displacement using layered displacement in Renderman. Layering displacement is something we do in VFX on a regular basis. There is a fork in...

Peter Aversten Lead Texture Artists Blogger Meshmen Studios Layered Shading in Renderman 22 Layered shading in CGI is common practice when you want to go from one surface property to another. For example, if you have a metal object that was painted and also covered...

Peter Aversten Lead texture artist Renderman 22 Lookdev using masks Using masks or ISOs as we sometimes called them is a common theme in VFX. We use them to alter textures or to apply effects limited to regions. In my case I exported two ISO maps from Mari,...

Peter Aversten Lead texture artist Megascans in Renderman 22 Megascans from Quixel have become an important resource when creating material based texturing and lookdev. So what is Megascans you might ask? Megascan is texture sets with tiled images all in sync....

Peter Aversten Lead Texture Artists Blogger Meshmen Studios Renderman 22 Textures Using textures is the bread and butter in 3D and likely you will have them in UDIM sequence when exported from Mari or Substance painter. Renderman utilizes special texture...

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Meshmen HDR megapack

This Meshmen HDR megapack features 15 HDR images for rendering and most in 8k. You will find hdr images captured in Sweden, the United Kingdom, and USA. Some are related to Visual effects in some way. Some obvious like outside MPC headquarters or the entrance to Cinesite building in Soho. now take them for a spin they are yours for less than my morning coffee, and you support my channel in the process.

The images were captured using a Nodal ninja HDR rig and my Canon 5dmk3 and the 8-15mm lens from canon. I use a promote HDR remote to bracket the images. The stitching of the HDR images was made in Autopano Gigga. I pre-merge the HDR images using Photomatix hdr software. where I take all images acquired and batch process them before the stitching process. Let me know in the comments below if you would like to see an episode on my youtube channel how I create the hdr images

make sure to check out my other free HDR images as well

Peter Aversten

Loading...Welcome to the crime scene, this is where I create the material on this blog and for the youtube channel. I captured the Meshmen HQ office in HDR using a nodal ninja HDR rig and my Canon 5dmk3 using a canon 8-15mm lens. This is my normal setup and I use a...

Meshmen Studio HDR Peter Aversten Editor in Chief, Lead texture artist Meshmen Studio HDR The last chivering moments before total chaos captured in true 16K high dynamic range. This could be the title for the HDR image but I chose just plain Meshmen Studio HDR. I...

Welcome to the crime scene, this is where I create the material on this blog and for the youtube channel. I captured the Meshmen HQ office in HDR using a nodal ninja HDR rig and my Canon 5dmk3 using a canon 8-15mm lens. This is my normal setup and I use a Promote HDR remote to set how many brackets I need. This HDR was captured using seven exposures with 2 stops in-between each exposure. Hope you enjoy and happy Rendering everyone!

Substance Painter to Mari workflows

Substance Painter is famous for its automation and ease of use for the artists. You have standardized ways to bake maps to drive smart masks and materials. In this tutorial series I will look into how we can replicate some of these workflow using Mari that is more suited for high res high UDIM count assets for VFX. We beginn ny taking a look at the baking methods found in Painter. For best result you will need a lowres and a highres model that you prepare by naming the different parts with the sufix _low and _high to differentiate and minimize baking errors.

Lets take a look together.

Substance to Mari Smart masks workflows

Smart masks in Substance Painter is one of the features that have made it so popular amongst game developers. The game industry has so many assets to texture and doing everything by hand would be impossible with today’s timeframes and quality demands. In VFX we tend to do a lot of very high res builds that previously did not fit into the game type workflows. Now both Mari and substance is looking into similar feature sets but from different angles of approach. In the example below, I will demonstrate an upcoming feature from Mari extension pack that mimics the features of the smart mask found in Substance Painter now translated into Mari land.

New series from Meshmen studio

This new series will take you through workflows found in Substance Painter and bring it into the Mari world. Sometimes you combine the best from each package to achieve the best available result

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https://meshmen.com/layered-displacement-in-renderman-22/#commentsTue, 04 Dec 2018 23:24:24 +0000http://meshmen.com/?p=5169The post Zbrush and Megascan using Layered Displacement in Renderman appeared first on meshmen.com.
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Peter Aversten

Lead Texture ArtistsBloggerMeshmen Studios

Layered Displacement in Renderman 22

Megascan materials and Zbrush displacement using layered displacement in Renderman. Layering displacement is something we do in VFX on a regular basis. There is a fork in the road where we must decide whether to add features in sculpting or as textures. Usually larger and mid-sized features come from the sculpting process. I generally like to add finer detail as textures using Mari. It’s easier to procedurally add some effects than to sculpt them. Also if you use material type textures you get the utility maps for free. You can apply them in sync using tiled or triplanar projections.

“Layered Displacement in Renderman! the bread and butter in VFX?”

Peter Aversten

Using Displacement in Renderman

The pxrDisplace node is what we will use to hook up displacement to our shader. Its connected to a shading group node. In Maya hypershade, you can either do it manually or select an already created shading group and create the node and it will auto connect for you. The displacement node can use both scalar and vector displacement but not at the same time. Our example will use scalar displacement from Zbrush.

About displacement Bounds

In Renderman, we have a displacement bound attribute on our objects, it will act as a limit for the displacement. Its there so you don’t use too much memory and effort and trace into infinity. By default, it’s set quite low and it will depend on your scene scale. Sometimes if the object is large you might have to increase this setting or you risk getting artifacts.

Here is an example of a sphere displaced with a checker texture and as you can see it renders with strange artifacts.

Increasing the bound will fix this.

Layered Displacement

We can also add displacement in layers and we have a special node for this. I usually add extracted displacement from 3D sculpt with added fine textural details on top as a layer. The node works in a similar fashion as the displace node but with added layer capabilities you can also choose between different blending modes such as add, subtract and over.

Not All Displacements Are Created Equal

In Mudbox you get a displacement map that is based around zero and I usually extract displacement using Zbrush where I set it to be based around 0.5 value. How do you go about unifying the values? pxrDisplacement transform to the rescue!

This utility node helps us to transform values into the default zero value that Renderman is expecting.

Now let’s take a look at all of this in action…..

Conclusion

We have now learned how to add sculpted and textured displacement in Renderman using the layer displacement node and utilities. Adding textured displacement as layers on top gives us the freedom to change details more easily, and material resources such as Megascan, texture XYZ makes is easier to get that extra bit of realism without the extra effort.

Create a HDR from a scene using Renderman Sometimes you want to take away the complexity of having a complete scene and instead render using a HDR light to mimic the light and reflections from the original scene. Sure the effect will not be physically correct as...

Peter Aversten Lead Texture ArtistsBloggerMeshmen Studios Layered Displacement in Renderman 22Megascan materials and Zbrush displacement using layered displacement in Renderman. Layering displacement is something we do in VFX on a regular basis. There is a fork in...

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Peter Aversten Lead texture artist Renderman 22 Lookdev using masks Using masks or ISOs as we sometimes called them is a common theme in VFX. We use them to alter textures or to apply effects limited to regions. In my case I exported two ISO maps from Mari,...

Peter Aversten Lead texture artist Megascans in Renderman 22 Megascans from Quixel have become an important resource when creating material based texturing and lookdev. So what is Megascans you might ask? Megascan is texture sets with tiled images all in sync....

Peter Aversten Lead Texture Artists Blogger Meshmen Studios Renderman 22 Textures Using textures is the bread and butter in 3D and likely you will have them in UDIM sequence when exported from Mari or Substance painter. Renderman utilizes special texture...

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